Tuesday, 16 September 2008

The above picture shows the total CO2 emissions in kilotons per country (red left) and the emissions per head in the same countries (blue right). I am not sure when or how this data was established but I found it not so long ago in the online edition of some famous french newspapers.

I must admit I always have been concerned about my impact on the environment and I am quite sure that most climbers and more generally those who love the outdoor are environmentally aware. Like most of us I usually try to do my bit to help. I use low energy light bulbs, recycle as much as possible and completely switch off most of my electrical appliances at night.... As an architect I decided to live within the city so I can usually walk / cycle to work and I have a recently built apartment which is supposedly better insulated.

But as a boulderer, I wanted to know what was my impact of the environment. And an obvious tool to quantify this is the carbon footprint test. Ireland's Plan of action on Climate change has a fairly straight forward carbon footprint test on their website http://www.change.ie/. You just register and fill in sections about your home, transport and waste. This is the result I got:

As shown on the comparison table if I was leaving in France, this would be fairly average, but as an resident of Ireland this is a good result. The trick then was to calculate how much of this was produced by my bouldering activity. In other words what amount of my carbon footprint is generated by:

Driving to Wicklow / any outdoor bouldering venue

Flying to Font or any other bouldering location on the continent

(Please note that a more precise quantification should also take into account the number of times you wash you climbing clothes, and the electricity used to light your training facility !)

So after a rapid estimation I took the test again excluding these transports figures and got the following result:

That basically means that bouldering is responsible for roughly 30% of my carbon emissions. Not exactly a environmentally friendly sport activity, is it?

So it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out what can be done: